Tutorials, Guides, Tips, and Tricks from Everyday Experiences

Until today, I had only heard of the time program to track how much time a program took to execute entirely. This is useful to see if there are any optimizations that can be made to make the program run quicker, but it doesn’t help troubleshoot or debug a program very easily since it only tracks the entry and exit of the program being ran. Another utility that allows you to track time in a more detailed manner is called gprof. Here’s a quote from the CS department of Utah School of Computing (link) explaining it in more detail:

Profiling allows you to learn where your program spent its time and which functions called which other functions while it was executing. This information can show you which pieces of your program are slower than you expected, and might be candidates for rewriting to make your program execute faster. It can also tell you which functions are being called more or less often than you expected. This may help you spot bugs that had otherwise been unnoticed.

Be sure to check out the man pages and other many guides out there that explain how to use it (no need for me to reinvent the wheel).

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